After two decades, home is where the heart is for Belle And Sebastian.
For outsiders – those whose understanding of Belle And Sebastian begins and ends at 1998’s The Boy With The Arab Strap – the Glaswegians will seem to have largely spent the last seven years doing what you might not expect.
Probably the most notable sideshow was Boaty McBoatface, on which they joined the likes of Mötley Crüe in running their own aquatic music festival, but they’ve also released a soundtrack for the directorial debut of The Inbetweeners’ Simon Bird (so so), a live compilation (superb) and collaboratively wrote the song Protecting The Hive with fans during lockdown.
These folk probably also think the band spend most of their time holed up in studios by the Clyde anyway, so they’ll feel vindicated in hearing that A Bit Of Previous was largely made on a DIY basis.
What they might be more surprised to learn is that it’s the band’s first domestically made effort in twenty years, one that otherwise would’ve been recorded in sunnier California but for you-know-what.
A less cosmopolitan backdrop has made however for their most prosaic album in a long time, one which trades musical hats with reassuring comfort, but whose predominant qualities are both human and grounded, both traits which – not coincidentally – come with the life experience you gain after thirty years in the music industry and beyond.
It’s this unavoidable march of time that opener Young And Stupid reflects soberly on, singer Stuart Murdoch chasing a fiddle with the moribund lines: ‘Now we’re old with creaking bones / Some with partners some alone / Some with kids and some with dogs / Getting through the nightly slog / Everything is fine when you’re young and stupid’.
The album isn’t titled Fifty Something Musos Have a Bit Of A Gripe, however. The revitalised collective have used the time in shared solitary instead to nudge themselves forward; the songs here turn many different corners but stick in no ruts.
If They’re Shooting At You – obliquely about the right to survival we took for granted seemingly a million years ago – bubbles soulfully with a peace-giving Rhodes, but the moment that departs the 140bpm rush of Talk To Me, Talk To Me races into view, its rusty bygone euro-pop a tonic as Murdoch swaps bars with an implacable foil in Sarah Martin.
Without the vagaries of studio hurry ups to deal with, and producing themselves, the stretching of their longish shadow is a joy to hear. The breezy homespun jazz of Come On Home revels in an age increasingly before beauty (‘Give a chance to the old/Set the record straight for the welfare state’), whilst Reclaim The Night deals lyrically with the permanent stain on women’s lives of toxic masculinity via tones of Hot Chip-esque electro-pop.
These flits from peak to peak also encompass a perfectly executed ballad on Do It for Your Country, Murdoch’s voice naked and traversing notes towards breaking, whilst the closer Working Boy In New York City imagines a possibility where the original plan of working stateside came true, a bar-boogie that opens and closes doors with an airy thrill.
Adding to the future classics pile is Prophets On Hold, a gently angelic reel for grown-ups which is part euphoria, part dance like no-ones watching treasure.
A Bit Of Previous takes its title from a Buddhist view that we are all essentially the same energy reincarnated into different lives; Belle And Sebastian offer exploration and making peace as their guiding principles on it, ones that should make any record great – and this is no exception.
